Servers and Data Center Details

The plan for the servers in FFXIV: A Realm Reborn is to have servers that can host a maximum of 5000 simultaneous connections. Unlike in 1.0 the servers will be recommended for specific regions, this means the days of playing with both Americans and Japanese are likely to be over. It will still be possible to join a server recommended for a different region however it is unlikely that people will do so, after all people want the most people online in their timezone as possible.

The servers will be housed in two data centers; one located in Japan and one located in North America. It is thought that the NA data center is located in the Canadian city of Montreal however this has not been confirmed. European players are recommended to use the NA data center but within this data center there are some servers recommended for EU players.

There is also another important point regarding servers. New servers will be created where only newly created characters can play. This means people will be unable to transfer characters created in FFXIV 1.0 to these servers until Square Enix decides otherwise. This has been done for those who fear starting on servers with already established economies where players may have millions of gil.

New Worlds

The server structure for new characters only is below. They are named after summons and iconic monsters found within the Final Fantasy series.

JP Data Center

NA/EU Data Center

Atomos

Adamantoise

Bahamut

Behemoth

Chocobo

Cactuar

Garuda

Coeurl

Ifrit

Diabolos

Mandragora

Gilgamesh

Ramuh

Goblin

Tiamat

Leviathan

Titan

Malboro

Tonberry

Midgardsormr

Ultros

Cerberus (EU)

Moogle (EU)

Odin (EU)

Shiva (EU)

Legacy Worlds

Legacy Worlds are defined as those in which existing characters can be transfered to. New players can still join these should they choose. Legacy worlds are named after powerful weapons from the Final Fantasy series.

JP Data Center

NA/EU Data Center

Aegis

Balmung

Durandal

Excalibur

Gungnir

Hyperion

Masamune

Sargatanas

Ridill

Ragnarok

A History of Legacy Worlds

Legacy worlds weren't always named after weapons as they are now. Originally FFXIV launched with 17 worlds; which was reduced to 10 after a poor launch forced server merges. The original servers were named after towns featured in the first 13 games of the Final Fantasy series.

The details of this server merge is below. It may help some people understand what happened to their original characters if they played before the merge but nor since.

Original

Current

Selbina

Ridill

Wutai + Gyashl

Masamune

Rabanastra + Cornelia

Durandal

Melmond + Figaro

Aegis

Istory + Mysidia

Gungnir

Saronia + Lindblum

Sargatanas

Fabul + Besaid

Balmung

Trabia + Kashuan

Hyperiod

Karnak + Palamecia

Excalibur

In addition to these merged and renamed servers, a new server called Ragnarok was created. This server was labelled as being recommended for players who were in European timezones. However not every EU player chose to transfer to this world, many were still attached to their original.

What about transferring from one newly created server to another? My brothers and I are playing where we first started on a newer JA server, Ramuh (we couldn't get on any NA server at the time due to one of many character restrictions), and we now want to get onto an NA server (Leviathan) where my friend is at, but rather than starting over from scratch, we were wanting to transfer servers. Anything on this?

Legacy players can create new characters on new servers but can't transfer their characters to new servers. The source would be the world transfers that are happening right now. I am legacy myself and I can only select the servers listed above as legacy.

Yeah the idea was good in theory however, but not in practice. The biggest problem however was the latency when accessing the JP servers from NA and EU. They have changed this with ARR (just updated this page with the new info) but it seems EU players will still be connecting to servers far away. Being in the UK I have a good enough ping to Montreal which is where the data center is thought to be so I can't complain.

In my opinion on of the big mistakes they made on Final Fantasy XI was not having the servers Region specific and having Japanese players play together with American players, I love playing with Japanese players but most of them just won’t play with us and that will cut the number of players we will be able to play with and find it harder to find a group.